Chechen separatist guerrillas threatened to shoot or blow up 700 hostages in a Moscow theater yesterday unless Russia pulled its troops out of their homeland.
The group of about 40, including masked women with explosives strapped to their bodies, burst in on Wednesday night firing into the air and shouting "Stop the war in Chechnya."
At least one member of the audience has been shot dead, reports said.
The radio station Ekho Moskvy quoted child heart specialist Maria Shkolnikova as telling it from inside the theater: "They are saying `You have been sitting here for 10 hours and your government has done nothing to secure your release.'"
"The main thing is that troops must be pulled out or they will start shooting people."
Earlier, Shkolnikova told reporters, also by mobile phone: "A huge amount of explosives have been laid through the place."
She said explosives had been laid in passageways and on seats and even attached to hostages themselves.
Officials said some 60 foreigners were among the captives.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who rose to power on pledges three years ago to clamp down on the decade-old rebellion on Russia's southern fringe and boost public security, said the main task was to secure the hostages' safe release.
He said information from the rebels' representatives confirmed that "the terrorist act was planned abroad."
Contacts with the hostage-takers appeared erratic at best.
The Chechen news website www.kavkaz.org reported what it said was a statement by the attackers' commander, Movsar Barayev. "There's more than a thousand people here. No one will get out of here alive and they'll die with us if there's any attempt to storm the building," the Web site quoted him as saying.
He called on Putin to stop the war and pull his troops out of Chechnya if he wanted to save the hostages' lives -- demands that were confirmed by Russian officials at the scene.
The rebels freed around 150 hostages soon after taking over the theater, including up to 20 children and a number of Muslims. They released a handful more yesterday morning including three children and a Briton in his 50s or 60s.
One Russian official said the guerrillas described themselves as a suicide death squad, or smertniki. Police said there were up to 700 people still in the theater, a modern building about 4km southeast of the Kremlin.
Austrian ambassador Franz Cede said the Western captives included Australians, Austrians, Britons, Germans and Americans.
The attack presented Putin with his sternest test since becoming president more than two years ago.
He has taken an uncompromising stand on the conflict in largely-Muslim Chechnya on Russia's southern fringes, where the Kremlin has twice launched military pushes to crush separatists.
Western accusations of human rights abuses against civilians in the devastated province have died down since Putin threw Moscow's backing behind the US-led global war on terrorism following last year's Sept. 11 attacks in the US.
It was unclear what foreign groups Putin might be accusing.
Russia has drawn attention to Arab fighters in Chechnya and accuses the rebels of links to radical Islamist groups like the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks. But privately, Western diplomats play down any Chechen involvement by al-Qaeda.
Several shooting incidents were reported in different parts of the five-storey theater after the gang burst in during the second act of the Russian musical Nord-Ost ("North-East").
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